Music notes: Chicago mystery solved

It bugged the hell out of me that I couldn’t ID the seven original members of Chicago in this photo, which appeared in last Friday’s Weekender accompanying staffer Jim Beal Jr.’s interview with woodwind/sax guy Walter Parazaider (the band played the Majestic that same night). The caption to the photo, from the archives of Getty Images, listed six names, which makes you question its accuracy just a wee bit, considering there are clearly seven guys in the picture.

After much research — which included exhaustive Web searches, digging through my record collection for posters and photos that came with “Chicago 2,” “Chicago at Carnegie Hall” and “Chicago VI” and consulting Chicago superfan Sandra Santos over in mySA.com (who, as it turns out, could have saved me all the trouble) — I have my answer.

At least, I hope so.

The band, from left: Pete Cetera, James Pankow, Lee Loughnane, Terry Kath, Walter Parazaider, Danny Seraphine and Robert Lamm. The photo in question was shot in 1970, just before Chicago appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival, one of the biggies of the Woodstock era. Held on an island off the English coastline, the festival (which actually predates Woodstock; it began in 1968) drew an estimated 600,000-800,000 folks in 1970, almost double the Woodstock estimates.

Needless to say, this caused a few logistical problems, since the venue was an island with a normal population of 100,000. It made getting to Woodstock look like a walk to the park. Not surprisingly, it was discontinued after 1970; the next festival was in 2002.

The main attraction was Jimi Hendrix, who would be dead less than a month later. The lineup also included everyone from The Who to the Doors to Miles Davis to Joni Mitchell to Tiny Tim.

In retrospect, Chicago seemed like an unlikely choice for a hippie-centric festival. But this was in the day before the band morphed into a middle-of-the-road hit machine. Chicago in 1970 was still considered edgy, having crafted big-band protest songs like “It Better End Soon” and “Someday” (which was preceded by “The whole world is watching” chant from the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago) to go with love songs like “Beginnings” and “Colour My World.”